Hey guys, I’ve been working on a new project in Humanities and it could possibly be one of my favourite projects yet. For the last few weeks we’ve been learning about nationalism throughout history and the significance and consequences of said nationalism. Once we had gained this new found knowledge it was time to use it to answer our driving question: How can we use current memes to comment on the significance and consequences of nationalism around the world?
However, as you can see, there is more to this driving question than knowing the affects of nationalism. We had to learn about memes as well, and what better way to learn about memes than to create them ourselves. But there’s another problem, memes go in and out of popularity, you could say they die off. This brings me to an idea we’ve been learning about in class, Dawkin’s Meme Theory. Darwin believed that a meme is an idea that is spread from person to person, usually conveying a message or practice. He also thought that these memes acted somewhat like genes, they would replicate and mutate to become a new meme/idea, they eventually die off because they aren’t replicating or mutating anymore. This behaviour is 100% true when it comes to modern day memes and the newest version of this is in TikTok. TikTok is a video sharing app that has many different creators on it. Usually these creators take part in trends that come across the app like different dances or joke formats. These trends are memes and act exactly like Darwin described, they become popular, everyone replicates them, some make their own version of them which sometimes also get replicated, but eventually no one is doing this trend any more and it dies away. But enough about that, as I said before the best way to learn about memes is to create them so here are the three TikToks I made with my friends:
American Boy Dance
Canada Check!
Whoever the face zoom lands on has to jump in the snow part 1
Part 2